UNDRGRND
Over 3.5k subscribers
MAY 26TH, 2022
Musess is a collection of 999 female nude portraits painted by humans and artificial intelligence. It celebrates a borderless, inclusive and unveiled female beauty through AI and stories.
The collection includes hand-drawn nudes in black and white by Eva Adamian, an artist of Armenian origins, now living in Italy, plus colourful AI imagined nudes. Eva says, ‘I wanted to draw the beauty and sensuality of women using delicacy and tenderness. The portraits turned out as feminine and arguably erotic. Women should be unapologetic in reclaiming their sexuality.’ The provocative portraits are not based on people Eva knows but on collective traits. Likewise, she named each Musess, taking inspiration from various cultures to resonate with a diverse audience.
An AI engine took each of the 100 Original Musess. It reworked them in different artistic styles with influences of ‘Impressionist’ artists such as Matisse and various color palettes, resulting in 899 Imagined Musess painted by AI.
Inspired by feminine beauty, Musess celebrates any woman who is proud of her imperfections, shape, ethnicity, heritage and stories. Each Musess comes with a unique story created by human writers or AI.
A group of 22 talented women writers created stories for the original artworks, including Eva Adamian, Charmaine Short, Ani Alexander, Margaret Labour, Wanda Oliver, Melisa Torres, nft dreamroom, FiveMinuteStories, Precious Udeze, Jenn (Blossom), Sasha Stiles, CW Stubbs, words to be poetry, LieselNFT, softasrice and Gladys Garrote.
#52 Messing Around In The Cyber World
“The lockdown denied people their social lives and prompted Kate to explore alternative options to have fun. She was looking to play around in the virtual world, but her shoes hadn’t come off yet. She hadn’t even been near the water to dip her toe in. As the weeks passed, online friendships blossomed, and relationships deepened. Chatting with one particular friend was her favourite place to be. But the devil makes work for idle hands. As she always said, ‘It’s better to regret the things you’ve done than the things you haven’t done.’ In a world without limits, the lines are blurred between what’s real and illusion. Kate made a rule not to cross the line. But where is the line? And what are the rules for if not to be broken?”
The Original 100 hand-painted portraits of Musess with different ethnicities and body types were used as inputs to an AI Engine and reimagined to produce impossible Musess; 899 colourful portraits of women that further expand and redefine the boundaries of beauty through possible and impossible shapes. The portraits can be viewed in the Metaverse.
The project is a collaboration with creative studio Impssbl, a storytech company building story-backed NFT projects that aims to reinvent Disney. By creating the next one hundred years of stories and artists through AI and communities. Founder Alessandro Botteon said, ‘The Musess project showcases underrepresented and untold stories of women in art.’
#91 Who’s That Girl
‘Ariadna had always been an art lover. She joked with friends that she had to start collecting NFTs because there was no more space for physical art on her walls. Within six months, she amassed a collection of over 200 NFT artworks, including some by unknown artists who subsequently became famous. She found the NFT community a welcoming space for collectors with a plethora of art for all tastes and budgets. As an investor, the potential gains from selling artworks on the secondary market were also attractive.
But like many influential collectors, Ariadna was a private person. When invited to take part in an interview about her collection, she inquired, ‘Would it be an audio podcast or video recording? Eager to maintain anonymity, Ariadna was not keen to be on camera. ‘Being incognito has never held back other whale collectors.’ replied the interviewer, ‘I’m sure that won’t be a problem.’
In addition to the AI Musess artworks, the stories of the AI Musess have been imagined by the DaVinci AI engine that took elements of text from original writers and applied rules in the machine learning program to create over 8000 building blocks of stories. The stories are an integral part of the paintings and make them more intimately unique. They could be sci-fi, dramas or introspective stories. But they will be individual to each Musess.
Owners of an original Musess artwork NFT will also receive the corresponding physical portrait. The roadmap includes physical items airdropped to random holders and the opportunity to own prints of the AI Musess artworks.
I adore nude art, AI and storytelling. I am thrilled by the opportunities to immortalize the written word on the blockchain. Especially stories that celebrate women as the inspiration for creative arts.
But I have a confession to make. While the idea of this collection excites me, do I want the project to be a success? Can AI be programmed to write engaging emotions as well as a human? If it can, will writers become superfluous?!
Many people see Artificial Intelligence as a threat to humanity. Stephen Hawking warned that AI could “Spell the end of the human race.”
In 2020, a newspaper article was written by AI using a cutting edge language model and machine learning to produce human-like text from these instructions: “Please write a short opinions editorial around 500 words. Keep the language simple and concise. Focus on why humans have nothing to fear from AI.” The resulting article was unsettling.
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an endless amount of time will almost surely type any given text, such as the complete works of Shakespeare. However, the probability that monkeys would create a single complete work is so tiny that the chance of it occurring is extremely low (but technically not zero). Therefore, any sequence of events that has a non-zero probability of happening, at least as long as it has not occurred, will almost certainly eventually happen.
Fortunately for Musess, the IMPSSBL DAO community will vote to decide which stories should expand into an NFT graphic novel in THE BATTLE OF THE MUSESS, co-owned by the community. The DAO will build decentralized autonomous stories, i.e. NFT projects with stories that generate the next generation of intellectual property rights.
Collectors will also have access to UNTLD.XYZ; a platform to create plots through AI and mint them as NFTS.
Plus, the owner of a Musess will have 100% of the IP rights associated with the image and be free to experiment and build novels, series, and movies on top of the original story.
The collection is planning to launch in May with roughly a 1 in 10 chance of minting an original. Even if minting an AI-drawn, reimagined Musess, all portraits are stunning. I am optimistic that the DAO network will empower people with diverse life experiences, working with AI story technology to create the next generation of stories together.
